Check this quote:
Social scientist Herbert Simon wrote in 1971
IN an information rich world, the wealth of information means the death of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence the wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
It’s just plain obvious that information consumes attention, but it is not always apparent how it is working on us.
Last night, I was at my weekly TaKeTiNa session with friends Brian Hoover and Shasta Martinuk, exploring what happens when we induce groove and confusion using rhythm, stepping and voice, and I was really struck with an exploration of the polarity between planning and doing.
One of the questions we were playing with was “What do you do with space?” The rhythmic pattern we were working with had moments of lots of space, and moments where several movements happened all at once. It was a kind of sprung rhthym, all carried over a steady beat. What I noticed was that in the spacious moments, I took time to get myself ready for the next burst of activity instead of resting in that spaciousness. The result was that, to the extent that my mind was living in the future, my body went there as well and I ended up often doing things AHEAD of the beat.
In other words there was so much information I was taking in, including information about what to do next, what to sing, how the polyrhythms worked, what else was going on in the room, that my attention to the present moment was erased and I had a hard time just DOING.
This polarity between planning and doing is familiar to me. When I meditate, and when my thoughts drift, they almost always drift to the future, to things I need to do or should be doing. I notice that this keeps me away from being in the present and actually paying attention to what is happening all around me.
In group settings, this imbalance can lead to me missing a whole bunch of information about where a group is at, if my mind is fixed on where we are going, or where we need to go.
By contrast, when I focus on the present, and on doing rather than planning, I am in balance. Balance in this case means that every part of my mind and body is HERE. Imbalance is when some part of your mind or body shifts elsewhere, and you very often topple in that case – physically or otherwise. Being present opens up the spaciousness of the present moment (what Harrison Owen calls “Expanding our Now“) and ironically opens many more possibilities and pathways for action.
So my learning from all of this is that information overload obscures attention, fills space and limits possibilities.
Think about that the next time you need to do a comprehensive environmental scan!
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This summer I have been gifting myself a weekly learning session with my friends Brian Hoover and Shasta Martinuk who are leading a TaKeTiNa workshop here on Bowen Island. TaKeTiNa is a moving rhythm meditation that provides a learning medium for dealing with questions, inquiries and awareness. In many ways it is like a musical version of the aikido based Warrior of the Heart training that we sometimes offer around Art of Hosting workshops. It is a physical process that seeks to short circuit the thinking mind and bring questions and insights to life.
We do this by creating difficult situations, polyrhythmic patterns using voice, stepping and hand clapping. This exploration of the edges of chaos and order is powerful, even in the short 90 minutes sessions we are doing.
Each session is offered as a learning journey, and so I have been coming the past two weeks with questions and ideas that I wanted to pursue. Yesterday I was think a lot about community and how people get left behind. In our group there were six of us, stepping, singing and clapping in ever increasing complexity. There were times when I lost the pattern and laid back into the basic drum beat, the basic vocal sounds and found my way back into the complicated rhthyms. It brought to mind a question: what violence do we do to groups of people when we have no heartbeat to come back to?
For any community or group, this heartbeat could be their deepest passion, their shared purpose or the thing they care most about. When those things aren’t visible, people get left behind, and chaotic circumstances lead to alienation and despair. So working a little with sensing the heartbeat, and arriving at a solid home place to return to.
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My friend Adam Yukelson wrote and asked me about how I hold questions instead of goals:
I was speaking with Gabe Donnelly last night and she was sharing a conversation the two of you had last year in which you said you don’t set goals, but rather, live in a question or questions. We were both drawn to this idea, and curious how it works for you. Do these questions tend to be broad and existential? Short-term and specific? Both? Neither? Are there subsets of questions? How do you know when a new question has emerged? I’d love to hear a little more….
They tend to be both…for a while now I’ve been carying these questions with me…they are varied and they take different forms and they even come and go, but they lead me into fascinating places: Sometimes they appear as research projects, other times they are direct and specific, and sometimes they float, nebulous and seem to inform everything I do.
- What is the role of community in organizations?
- What are the essential practices of hosting that can be taught?
- How do we build relational fields between people?
- What are the ways I can express myself in song?
- How can I use body practice more in my work and life?
- What can my daughter and I do to co-create a shared learning journey?
The community question seems to be the most broad and pervasive in my work right now and I’ve held that for over a year. It helps me to see things the same way, for example, as when you buy a new car and then notice that everyone else seems to be driving the same car as you. The second and third questions relate to learning new ways to teach and communicate what people want to learn from me about hosting. The last three questions are about my life and practice as an artist and a father. I don’t have these questions written down anywhere, I just sort of hold them lightly and they focus my attention.
What are the questions you hold?
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That is one of the principles of wayfinding, which is simply to say that if you don’t know what to do, start anywhere and follow it somewhere. Each step will reveal the next thing to do.
For a beautiful, beautiful exercise in doing this, go here and play for a while with the ToneMatrix.
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Over the past few years, I have enjoyed watching Otto Scharmer’s practice develop as he moves between the world of high level systems thinking and grounded facilitation practice. The first book he helped write, Presence, was a lovely distillation of his reasearch and I have been working a lot with his new book, Theory U, with its grounding in practice, to work with networks and communities who are trying to access the source of their collective futures.
I have also appreciated his willingness to openly share the tools he and the presencing community have been developing at the Presencing Institute website. It means that we can play with and prototype the use of the tools in different contexts. One of the tools which I have used a lot is the Theory U journalling practice. At the past two Art of Hosting trainings (Bowen Island in September, and Springfield, IL earlier this week) we used that practice to reflect and ground the experience of the Art of Hosting and to set up a way of diving into what comes next, as a way of leaving the deep space of learning together and re-entering the world.
Here are Otto’s questions, taken from the latest version at the Presencing website. The last question is one I have been using as well. The instruction here is to go sort of quickly through these questions, not to get stuck, but to flow through the process. This can be done either as a solo exercise or in groups. If you are working in groups, you could move into a period of small group conversation about some of the learning. The whole things takes 25 minutes minimum, if you give people a minute or so for reflection and writing. I do it the way Otto does it, by reading the questions aloud to the group and having people reflect and write silently the first answers that come to them:
[ 1 ] Challenges: Look at yourself from outside as if you were another person: What are the 3 or 4 most important challenges or tasks that your life (work and non-work) currently presents?
[ 2 ] Self: Write down 3 or 4 important facts about yourself. What are the important accomplishments you have achieved or competencies you have developed in your life (examples: raising children; finishing your education; being a good listener)?
[ 3 ] Emerging Self: What 3 or 4 important aspirations, areas of interest, or undeveloped talents would you like to place more focus on in your future journey (examples: writing a novel or poems; starting a social movement; taking your current work to a new level)?
[ 4 ] Frustration: What about your current work and/or personal life frustrates you the most?
[ 5 ] Energy: What are your most vital sources of energy? What do you love?
[ 6 ] Inner resistance: What is holding you back? Describe 2 or 3 recent situations (in your work or personal life) where you noticed one of the following three voices kicking in, which then prevented you from exploring the situation you were in more deeply:Voice of Judgment: shutting down your open mind (downloading instead of inquiring)
Voice of Cynicism: shutting down your open heart (disconnecting instead of relating)
Voice of Fear: shutting down your open will (holding on to the past or the present instead of letting go)[ 7 ] The crack: Over the past couple of days and weeks, what new aspects of your Self have you noticed? What new questions and themes are occurring to you now?
[ 8 ] Your community: Who makes up your community, and what are their highest hopes in regard to your future journey? Choose three people with different perspectives on your life and explore their hopes for your future (examples: your family; your friends; a parentless child on the street with no access to food, shelter, safety, or education). What might you hope for if you were in their shoes and looking at your life through their eyes?[ 9 ] Helicopter: Watch yourself from above (as if in a helicopter). What are you doing? What are you trying to do in this stage of your professional and personal journey?
[ 10 ] Imagine you could fast-forward to the very last moments of your life, when it is time for you to pass on. Now look back on your life’s journey as a whole. What would you want to see at that moment? What footprint do you want to leave behind on the planet? What would you want to be remembered for by the people who live on after you?
[ 11 ] From that (future) place, look back at your current situation as if you were looking at a different person. Now try to help that other person from the viewpoint of your highest future Self. What advice would you give? Feel, and sense, what the advice is–and then write it down.
[ 12 ] Now return again to the present and crystallize what it is that you want to create: your vision and intention for the next 3-5 years. What vision and intention do you have for yourself and your work? What are some essential core elements of the future that you want to create in your personal, professional, and social life? Describe as concretely as possible the images and elements that occur to you.
[ 13 ] Letting-go: What would you have to let go of in order to bring your vision into reality? What is the old stuff that must die? What is the old skin (behaviors, thought processes, etc.) that you need to shed?
[ 14 ] Seeds: What in your current life or context provides the seeds for the future that you want to create? Where do you see your future beginning?
[ 15 ] Prototyping: Over the next three months, if you were to prototype a microcosm of the future in which you could discover “the new” by doing something, what would that prototype look like?
[ 16 ] People: Who can help you make your highest future possibilities a reality? Who might be your core helpers and partners?
[ 17 ] Action: If you were to take on the project of bringing your intention into reality, what practical first steps would you take over the next 3 to 4 days?
[ 18 ] Anchoring: What is one question you could take with you that would anchor this intention and keep you checking into it?